Journalists foster online communities

Community "management" has become an essential online journalistic skill, according to a survey into digital trends.

Evidently, an overwhelming number of editors and reporters now engage with their online audiences, and also manage them, within their own websites and also through other social media sites.

That's one of the main findings of the third Broadgate Mainland digital trends survey, which was conducted among 100 British financial and business journalists.

It found that 81% of respondents are engaging on a regular basis with their digital readers, thus fostering online communities.

Among other findings:

* Twitter has grown in popularity over the past year, with one third to half of all journalists using it to monitor conversations, researching stories and chatting with friends and colleagues.

* The number of hits a story receives has become the most popular measure of success among journalists.

* Email remains the preferred method of pitches from PRs. Just under a fifth of journalists prefer speaking on the phone. Not one journalist said they would prefer to be pitched at through Twitter or LinkedIn.